Saturday, December 22, 2012

Earlier
in this series we discussed the vagina monologues, a Feminist university play
in which women dress up as vaginas, and where, in the original production, a
13-year-old girl is given drinks by a
24-year-old lesbian until she becomes drunk, has sex with her, and
afterward says “If it was rape, it was a
good rape.” This play was performed on college campuses across the west for
years with no objection by the academic community. From the magazine The National
Review we hear of a much lighter version of the play, with a twist:

College administrators have been enthusiastic
supporters of Eve Ensler’s play The
Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate “V-Day” (short
for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams
University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating
Penis Day and staging a satire called The
Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. Two participating
students, Monique Stuart and Andy Mainiero, have just received sharp letters of
reprimand and have been placed on probation by the Office of Judicial Affairs.

The costume of the P-Day “mascot” — a friendly looking “penis” named
Testaclese, has been confiscated and is under lock and key in the office of the
assistant dean of student affairs, John King. The P-Day satirists are the first to admit that
their initiative is tasteless and crude. But they rightly point out that V-Day
is far more extreme. They are shocked that the administration has come down
hard on their good-natured spoof, when all along it has been completely
accommodating to the in-your-face vulgarity of the vagina activists.

V-Day has now replaced Valentine’s Day on more
than 500 college campuses (including Catholic ones). The
high point of the day is a performance of Ensler’s raunchy play, which consists
of various women talking in graphic, and I mean graphic, terms about their
intimate anatomy. The play is poisonously anti-male. Its only romantic scene,
if you can call it that, takes place when a 24-year-old woman seduces a young
girl (in the original version she was 13 years old, but in a more recent
version is played as a 16-year-old.) The woman invites the girl into her car,
takes her to her house, plies her with vodka, and seduces her. What might seem
like a scene from a public-service kidnapping-prevention video shown to
schoolchildren becomes, in Ensler’s play “a kind of heaven.”

Lollipops. Vagina lollipops.

The week before V-Day, the Roger Williams campus
was plastered with flyers emblazoned with slogans such as “My Vagina is Flirty”
and “My Vagina is Huggable.” There was a widely publicized “orgasm workshop.”
On the day of the play, the V-warriors sold lollipops in the in the shape
of–-guess what? Last year, the student union was flooded with questionnaires
asking unsuspecting students questions like “What does your Vagina smell like?”
None of this offended the administration or elicited any reprimands,
probations, or confiscations.

The campus conservatives artfully (in the college
sense of "artful") mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the
school with flyers that said, “My penis is majestic” and “My penis is
hilarious.” The caption on one handout read, “My Penis is studious.” It showed
Testaclese reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone’s Hard America,
Soft America.

Provost Kavanaugh and Testaclese

“Testaclese” tipped the scales when he approached the university
Provost, Edward J. Kavanagh, outside the student union. Apparently taking
him/it for a giant mushroom, Provost Kavanagh cheerfully greeted him. But when
Testaclese presented him with an honorary award as a campus “Penis Warrior,”
the stunned official realized that it was no mushroom. After this incident,
which was recorded on videotape, the promoters of P-Day were ordered to cease
circulating their flyers and to keep Testaclese off campus grounds. Mindful of
how school officers had never once protested any of the antics of Vagina
warriors, the P-warriors did not comply. The Testaclese costume was then
confiscated and formal charges followed.

It is easy to understand why school officials would not want a
six-foot phallus wandering around campus; nor why they would ask students not
to paper the college with posters describing all the things it likes to do. But
that is just the sort of thing the vagina warriors have been doing, year after
year, on hundreds of campuses. In fact, P-Day at Roger Williams was mild by
comparison. Wesleyan College hosted a “C***” workshop; Penn State held a
“C***”-fest [both of which were named after crass four-letter names for female
genitalia]. At Arizona State, students displayed a 40-foot inflatable plastic
vagina. It was not confiscated and no one was ever threatened with probation.

Unhappily, P-Day may be the only effective means of countering V-Day
with all its c-fests, graphic lollipops, intrusive questionnaires, outsized
effigies of vaginas and its thematic anti-male play. The prospect of public
readings from P-Monologues on campuses around the country just might be the
reductio ad absurdum that could drive the vagina warriors to the bargaining
table. The student activists opposed to V-Day will gladly cancel P-Day the
moment the V-warriors abandon their vagina–fests. But for the short term, college administrators should brace
themselves. The rebels at Roger Williams are talking about a Free Testaclese
Fund. And word is spreading to other campuses. P-Day and Testaclese will be
back next year. And not just in Rhode Island.

Why
is it the case among some faculty and administrators that sexual expression is pornographic
– and hence crude – only when it is displayed by men? When we covered rape hysteria by students, we discussed the story from the student newspaper Harvard Crimson, in which a few Harvard students built a
9-foot “snow penis” on campus, which was torn down by a Feminist student who equated
the erection of the sculpture to the support for rape. But focusing here
on faculty and administrators, it is the section featuring a professor that
presently concerns us:

The Harvard Snow Penis

Women’s Studies Lecturer Diane L. Rosenfeld, who
teaches Women, Violence and the Law this semester, said that the implications
of the snow phallus go beyond the legitimacy of the statue’s presence. “The ice
sculpture was erected in a public space, one that should be free from menacing
reminders of women’s sexual vulnerability,” Rosenfeld wrote in an e-mail
yesterday.”

She said the snow penis follows a long line of
public phallic symbols, including the Washington Monument and missiles. “Women
do not need to be reminded of the power of the symbol of the male genitalia,”
Rosenfeld said. “My guess is that they are constantly reminded of it in daily
messages.” A discussion about feminist perspectives on the statue, sponsored by
the Radcliffe Union of Students, will take place Tuesday night in the Adams
House small dining room.

Some
questions come to mind: based on what we have seen so far, is it likely that this Feminist
perspective will be one that values male and female sexuality equally, or is it
more likely to be a perspective that attaches a positive sign to one and a
negative sign to the other? If the latter is the case, is it then more likely
or less likely that the students will adopt the anti-male attitudes of their
professors and join with her in contributing to a hostile learning environment
for male students? And if such is the case, could we be making a better use of
our academic institutions?

Dr. Christina Hoff-Sommers, a Feminist who
disagrees with much of establishment Feminism, tells us in her book Who Stole Feminism of the driving
attitudes behind this reform project:

The New
Jersey Project for reforming the public schools circulated a document entitled
“Feminist Scholarship guidelines.” The first guideline is unexceptionable:
“Feminist scholars seek to recover the lost work and thought of women in all
areas of human endeavor.”

Sounds good so far. Hoff-Sommers next
says, “Feminist scholarship begins with an awareness that much previous
scholarship has offered a white, male, Eurocentric, heterosexist, and elite
view of ‘reality.’”

Men have all the best jobs! Male privilege!

This is a typical Feminist argument in
academia: that scholarship has historically focused on the “greats” in society
and history: war generals, presidents, great poets and great artists. In other
words, people, ideas, and events who and which are “at the top,” and are the
movers and shakers of the world. Their approach sounds benevolent, until you
consider the fact that it’s not like they care about the under-representation of
men at the bottom of society: the common man who died in the coal mine, or the
lowly and unnamed soldier. We will explore more of this vein of thought more fully
elsewhere.

I include such quotes to demonstrate that these so-called scholarly guidelines
aim to teach people – usually people who sit on committees and decide what gets
published - to recognize how male scholars (allegedly) have traditionally
thought, and once they are aware of it, to move away from publishing such
material. But problems emerge when Feminist professors begin to stereotype what
they believe to be male “ways of knowing,” or as they might instead say,
“phallocentric epistemologies.” Dr. Hoff-Sommers goes on to say:

The
guidelines elaborate on the attitude toward masculinist scholarship and methods
by quoting the Feminist theorist Elizabeth Fee [who says]: “Knowledge was
created by an act of aggression – a passive nature had to be interrogated,
unclothed, penetrated, and compelled by man to reveal her secrets.” Fee’s
resentment and suspicion of male “ways of knowing” follows a path well-trodden
by such Feminist thinkers as Mary Ellman, [professor] Catharine MacKinnon, and
Sandra Harding, whose views of patriarchal knowledge and science have quickly
become central gender feminist doctrine.

Playing on
the biblical double meaning of knowing to refer both to intercourse and to
cognition, Ellman and MacKinnon claim that men approach nature as rapists
approach a woman, taking joy in violating “her,” in “penetrating” her secrets.
Feminists, says MacKinnon, have finally realized that for men, “to know has
meant to fuck.” In a similar mood, Sandra Harding suggests that Newton’s
Principles of Mechanics could just as aptly be called “Newton’s Rape Manual”
(page 66).

Why does everything have to be about rape
to certain Feminists? One might think that if they actually cared about expanding
women’s autonomy, they would recognize that there is enough fear of rape in the
world without needing to make it up out of nothing. But this is precisely the
opposite of what they do. In the Chapter Five of Who Stole Feminism, Dr. Hoff-Sommers
tells us,

Women:
A Feminist Perspective is said to be the best-selling women’s studies textbook
of all time. The first selection, “Sexual Terrorism” by Carole J. Sheffield, is
a good example of how the Feminist classroom can “infuse” anxiety and rage.”
Ms. Sheffield describes an “ordinary” event that took place early one evening
when she was alone in a Laundromat:

“The
Laundromat was brightly lit; and my car was the only one in the lot. Anyone
passing by could readily see that I was alone and isolated. Knowing that rape
is a crime of opportunity, I became terrified.” Ms. Sheffield left her laundry
in the washer and dashed back to her car, sitting in it with the doors locked
and the windows up. [Sheffield goes on to say] “When the wash was completed, I
dashed in, threw the clothes into the drier, and ran back out to my car. When
the clothes were dry, I tossed them recklessly into the basket and hurriedly
drove away to fold them in the security of my house. Although I was not
victimized in a direct, physical way or by objective or measurable standards, I
felt victimized. It was, for me, a terrifying experience.” At home, her terror
subsides and turns to anger: “Mostly I was angry at being unfree: a hostage of
a culture that, for the most part, encourages violence against females,
instructs men in the methodologies of sexual violence, and provides them with
ready justification for their violence…following my experience at the
Laundromat, I talked with my students about terrorization” (87-88).

If this event had occurred late at night –
say, after dark – it would be understandable to possess a reasonable fear of
being out alone – regardless as to whether one is female or male. But the
timeframe of this event is “early one evening,” before dark. There is a fine
line between prudence and paranoia, and by the time of day we are able to
reasonably infer that she is crossing it. And more: she is teaching her
students to see the imminent threat of rape everywhere. There are some people who
are so strongly bound in the clutches of their self-imposed fears that they
lack the ability to perform basic functions during normal daytime hours. What
is often missed in such an approach is that we cannot empower women by teaching
them to limit their autonomy by pretending they are always in danger of
victimization when they are not. And we cannot build respect between both sexes
by teaching one sex the irrational fear of the other.

Heterophobia

Daphne
Patai and Norette Koertge, two former women’s studies professors, interviewed
women’s studies students and recorded their perspectives in their book Professing Feminism. Here is one
student’s experiences, which deserves to be quoted at length:

“Caroline, a social worker in her mid-twenties,
says that the one Women’s Studies course she took at a private women’s college
was more than enough. Caroline deplores ‘this ongoing knee-jerk reverse sexism
which everyone tolerated and
encouraged.” She later says, “The course was Introduction to Women’s Studies. I
was a senior, and I was, I think, pretty confident by that time, and I remember
clashing with the professor very quickly…In the class I took, the answer was
always ‘men.’ Whatever the question was, the answer was ‘men.’ It could be,
‘What style of architecture is that?’ And the answer is, ‘Men’s architecture.’
Or, ‘Who contributes to all the violence in the world?’ ‘Men.’ ‘Who’s
responsible for everything we endure?’ ‘Men.’

“I was involved with a man at the time, and I
thought that he didn’t fit their categories of what men were like. And I also
saw him as having been pressed into stereotypes of his own. When he’d been in
high school, he took up computers. He’d been very nonathletic, hated team
sports, wanted to read, wanted to fuss with his computers. And he was called a
nerd and hassled constantly over this and abused in various ways.

And I felt like I really identified with that –
I hadn’t been all that feminine in high school. I wore a black leather jacket,
hung out with the guys, and people had made fun of me. I hadn’t been desirable
as a woman; he hadn’t been desirable as a man…so I guess I was interested in a
more global analysis, like: What is it in our society that creates some of
these tensions? What is it that we’re doing to ourselves here? I’m not saying I
wanted the whole course to be about this, but these questions weren’t
acceptable at all, and I felt the professor responded really aggressively to
me.

“The time that it really sort of came to a head
was when we were talking about rape: ‘Rape – the act of violence that men do to
women, that men do to women because they want to keep them down.’ And we got
all these reasons why men rape women. And I thought, well, there’s this act of
violence of men against women, and why don’t we explore a little bit why people
are so frustrated and so violent and so angry that they do these things? And
why don’t we take into consideration that men get raped too?

I had a friend in high school, a man, who was
raped by a bunch of other men his age, and when I tried to enter this
information, it was met with a stone wall: ‘Those statistics are insignificant
compared with how many women are raped.’ And I thought, Well, how many men are
reporting it? And why are you discounting what I’m trying to share here, which
would be adding to the picture?

And I don’t remember the comment the professor
made, but it was very condescending, to the effect: ‘Are you saying that
rapists are just poor misunderstood people who should be patted on the back and
sent out?’ And I’m thinking: You miserable bitch! You know, she was really like
‘Let me humiliate you in front of everyone,’ because of course, that was not
what I was saying!

“I have friends who’ve been raped; it’s not like
some far-away thing to me. It’s something to get really angry about and be
upset about, but something to search for a better solution to than castration!
But the only solution the professor was getting at was that men are the problem
and without men there’d be a solution. There was no talk of real solutions (82-84).

A poster at UCLA

When discussing rape hysteria by students,
we covered numerous demonstrations by primarily Feminist students, the attitudes
of which were pervasively one of spite and hostility toward men and boys. At
the end of those videos questions that are worth asking again: does this
approach work toward helping victims of rape, or encourage others to work
toward helping victims of rape? And if it is not about helping victims of rape,
what is it really about?

Freshman orientation at 60 colleges

And now that we are knee-deep in discussing rape
hysteria by faculty and administrators, the time has come to ask the question:
where are these students who we discussed in our earlier videos getting their anti-male
attitudes? Are these students just randomly and out of the blue waking up one
day with an attitude of hostility toward men and boys, or is that attitude
being taught? We will continue to explore these questions in our next video in
this series.

Friday, December 21, 2012

A
Women's Studies class from Marshall University is extending a list they
compiled from a writing assignment in hopes to raise awareness during Domestic
Violence Awareness Month. The
students in Laura Diener's Women Studies 101 class compiled "I want a
twenty-four-hour truce" from their own papers. The idea for the list came
from a speech given by Andrea Dworkin in 1983.

The article later says:

“The
idea is that coming from the Andrea Dworkin piece," Diener said. "We
can't have a 24-hour truce with rape, it's impossible, which is such a sad
thing. We can't have a truce with no violence, we can't have a truce with no
rape, we can't have one with no cruelty but we want that and the fact that we
can't have these simply things show some of the major problems in our
society"

Diener
said this assignment is in context with other assignments where students write
down their biggest fears, and amazingly they always include sexual assault and
violence.

"The
overall goal is to show the way that individual students are responding to some
traditional feminist pieces," Diener said. "The way that this piece
was written several decades ago, the way that it's still really relevant today,
the way it shows that rape and sex violence is a fear that really haunts
Marshall University students today."

Andrea
Dworkin is a Radical Feminist. To give a picture of her particular flavor of
Feminism, in her book Letters from a War
Zone, the same book in which her speech on a 24-hour truce is found, she
writes things like this:

"One can know everything and still be unable to
accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so
that the one without the imminent possibility of the other is unthinkable and
impossible." - Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 21.

Elsewhere in the same book she says:

"The newest variations on this distressingly ancient theme center
on hormones and DNA: men are biologically aggressive; their fetal brains were
awash in androgen; their DNA, in order to perpetuate itself, hurls them into
murder and rape." – Andrea Dworkin, Letters
from a War Zone, p. 114

And from another publication:

“Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also
the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman," - Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood, p. 20

"Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.
Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage
meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession
of, or ownership. Only when manhood is dead--and it will perish when ravaged femininity
no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be
free.” – Andrea Dworkin, Pornography

These are a
few of the many morally questionable statements by Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin was
one of the most vitriolic preachers of hatred that has ever walked the Earth,
and one thing she devoted an inordinate amount of time to was equating the
normal desires and functions of men with rape.

"She Fears You," by Keith Edwards

But let us consider her speech, which the students were required to read in professor Laura Diener’s women’s studies
class. Andrea Dworkin originally gave this speech at the National
Organization for Changing Men, which was later renamed the National Organization of Men Against Sexism,or NOMAS. NOMAS, as they declare on their website, is a part of the
pro-feminist men’s movement. This puts them in the same ideological camp as
Keith Edwards, who gave the presentation “She Fears You” at 60 colleges and
universities, and who we discussed in the last post in this series. NOMAS is also, as you
might guess, an organization of academics, particularly from Men’s Studies, a
field often hosted by those who bear the same attitudes as Keith Edwards.

In her speech, Dworkin calls
upon the men at NOMAS to organize among all men a day in which rape does not
occur. Due to space constraints I will not present her entire speech here, but
rather a few selections. Keep in mind as we go through her statements that this
is how Dworkin treated those who are the most sympathetic to her worldview. She
says:

“I have thought a great deal about how a feminist, like myself, addresses
an audience primarily of political men who say that they are antisexist. And I
thought a lot about whether there should be a qualitative difference in the
kind of speech I address to you. And then I found myself incapable of
pretending that I really believe that that qualitative difference exists. I
have watched the [pro-feminist] men's movement for many years. I am close with
some of the people who participate in it. I can't come here as a friend even
though I might very much want to. What I would like to do is to scream.”

"I think
that you rightly perceive--without being willing to face it politically--that
men are very dangerous: because you are."

“What's involved in doing something about all of this? The [pro-feminist]
men's movement seems to stay stuck on two points. The first is that men don't
really feel very good about themselves. How could you?”

"Have
you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It's not
because there's a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we
believe in your humanity, against all the evidence."

“The shame
of men in front of women is, I think, an appropriate response both to what men
do and to what men do not do. I think you should be ashamed."

"I mean that there is a relationship between the way
that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that
grinds you up and spits you out: the war machine that you go through just like
that woman went through Larry Flynt's meat grinder on the cover of Hustler. You damn
well better believe that you're involved in this tragedy and that it's your
tragedy too. Because you're turned into little soldier boys from the day that
you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of
women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the
world in which you live. It is also part of the economy that you frequently
claim to protest."

“And the problem is that you think it's out there:
and it's not out there. It's in you.”

“And I want one day of respite, one day off, one day
in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to
the old, and I am asking you to give it to me. And how could I ask you for
less--it is so little. And how could you offer me less: it is so little. Even
in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for
one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.”

As we can see, Dworkin believes that men
as a group make war upon women as a group, a situation for which all men are collectively
guilty. She believes all men are socialized with the proclivity to rape. She
believes there is no qualitative difference between men who are sympathetic to
her concerns, and men who are not, and that all men deserve to be collectively
punished and shamed. My concern is that when women’s studies professors teach
the writings of Andrea Dworkin, they are not just teaching students her words;
they are teaching students her attitudes.

And although the misandry in Dworkin’s
writings vary in terms of how explicit and extreme it is, the same
dichotomization of “us versus them” with “us” being all women and “them” being all men, the same characterization of
men as a group being “all in it together,” and the portrayal of women as
completely devoid of agency, is a consistent theme in her work. But how prominent
is work like hers in academia?

Feminist Jurisprudence

Intro to Feminist Jurisprudence

If you read the anthology Feminist Jurisprudence, which primarily features
the work of Feminist legal theorists in academia, you will find not only the
writings of Andrea Dworkin’s, but also the writings of Radical Feminist
professors such as Catharine MacKinnon and Ann Scales. In this anthology, you
will find a section devoted exclusively to Radical Feminism, where the ideology
– which is widely regarded as one of hatred and intolerance – is instead presented
as a legitimate school of thought worthy of sanctuary in our academic
institutions. In another academic publication Introduction to Feminist Jurisprudence, which is taught in classes
on legal theory, you will find similar sections set aside for Radical Feminism.

A dissenting Feminist and former women’s
studies professor named Daphne Patai says in her book Heterophobia:

In late
February 1998, I attended a conference on sexual harassment held at Yale
University…many luminaries were there, including Catharine MacKinnon herself.
At the conference’s opening session, Andrea Dworkin, the radical
feminist…informed the audience of several hundred people that the “backlash”
began when white middle-class men saw that sexual harassment law was going to
affect them. This reaction, Dworkin thoughtfully suggested, showed us that
“millions of men wanted to have a young woman at work to suck their cock.”

"Did anyone
rise to contest such outrageous slander directed at all or even most men? On
the contrary. It is hard to imagine any other group of people in the United
States today who could be so crassly maligned in a public setting without
arousing immediate protest (6-8)."

I would like to take a second to
accentuate the fact that these things are occurring at such schools as Harvard and
Yale University. The infamous 2006 false rape case, in which 88 faculty
speaking for five academic departments and 10 academic programs ganged up on
three falsely accused students and presumed their guilt based on nothing more
than their genetic code, occurred at Duke University, a school which is
nicknamed “the Harvard of the South.” In their in-house publishing company,
Princeton University publishes The Canon
of American Legal Thought. A canon, in academic terms, is what the
Victorian poet Matthew Arnold said, “the best that has been thought and written.”
In the table of contents for this publication, we find that for each stratum of
philosophy there are a variety of authors giving voice to each. But when we
come to section where gender theory intersects with legal theory, we find one voice alone representing that school of legal thought: Radical Feminist professor Catharine MacKinnon. We will discuss MacKinnon in more detail later.

What is important to take away from this
is that these are not backwoods community colleges tucked away in a geographic
corner and marginalized from the discourse on what constitutes acceptable
academic practice and philosophy. These are Ivy League institutions that set
the standard not only for their respective schools, but for much of the
academic establishment in the Western world. What is supported by one Ivy
league school will be supported by a thousand more for that fact alone.

The prevalence of misandry in some of our
most prestigious schools is not that surprising when you think about it. Being
among the top tier institutions, they have a natural incentive to recruit the
newest and most cutting edge scholars who promote philosophies that push the
boundaries. Unfortunately, one of those newest philosophies is Radical
Feminism.

“Critics of radical feminism
have been often accused of exaggerating the importance of a handful of
male-haters in the movement. Yet Dworkin was never relegated to the lunatic
fringe where she belonged: her texts have been widely assigned in women's
studies courses, and prominent feminists from activist Gloria Steinem to
philosopher Martha Nussbaum have offered their praise, treating her
hatemongering as extremism in defense of the oppressed.” – Cathy Young, Boston
Globe, April 2005

"We do not want to do the work of helping you to believe in your own humanity. We cannot do it anymore. We have always tried. We have been repaid with systematic exploitation and systematic abuse. You're going to have to do this by yourselves from now on, and you now it."

Jensen later says that "that is really the challenge: for us to take up the gift that Feminism has offered us." I do agree with professor Jensen on some
things: extreme Feminism does present us with a challenge. And I also agree
with professor Jensen that men do need to assert their humanity, and that
Radical Feminism will not be helping us get there.

We will explore more of the
phenomenon of rape hysteria by faculty and administrators in our next post in
this series.